Vachon Imagined

Becoming a person who isn’t disrespectful requires accepting an inconvenient truth:

You have been disrespectful.

You probably are disrespectful now.

And you may not even know it.

Here’s where things get hugely impressive: you are representing an entire race. Go further down the hierarchy and you’re representing a religion, a gender, a political party, a profession, a family, a community.

That’s your representation.

It isn’t your full identity, but let’s stay for a moment with who you claim to be.

When you encounter disrespect, you aren’t actually encountering a physical person. You are encountering a spirit. A life.

Information comes in and the brain says, Ah, yes. I learned this is disrespect.

So I’m going to hold up the flag of life, mark this DISRESPECT, and place it outside of me.

And now, and here’s where it gets fun, folks, hang on:

I’m going to DEMAND that you change who you are so I can feel safer in my own skin.

And here’s the thing: it is rare to find the person who says,

“I apologize. I will change my behavior to meet your needs. I’ll change the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I act, the way I believe, and everything else so that you can feel safe inside yourself.”

We generally don’t do that.

Instead, we demand.

And that’s where relationships die.

That’s where resentment grows.

That’s where physical violence can enter.

And somehow, after all of it, we still don’t get what we wanted in the first place:

Love.

Respect.

Why?

Because we are acting from the same consciousness we are trying to change in someone else.

Life is moving so fast, and it is such an incredible force that even calling it life seems to limit its fullness. But we need language to communicate, so we give it a word.

A symbol.

Not life itself.

The peacemakers, the exchangers of life between the physical and the invisible, do something very simple.

They feel.

They notice.

They release.

This doesn’t mean they never say anything. It means they learn that everything they experience does not require a response.

Sometimes disrespect is simply something that happened.

It isn’t necessarily something that needs to be solved.

Because what we experienced as disrespect isn’t life itself.

Life is.

And when we make peace with life, we become willing to lay down what we think we need in order to give another person what they need.

Why?

Because peacemakers know they are taken care of.

They know that life is not asking them to defend themselves every moment.

And that knowledge is worth so much more than pride.

Pride says, You need to change so I can be okay.

Peace says, I am okay, and therefore I don’t need to change you.